Scott writes about Internet competition and threats to tech capitalism (economic regulation, property infringement, and harmful industry behavior and misrepresentation.) Cleland is President of Precursor® LLC, a Fortune 500 research consultancy focused on the future of Internet competition, privacy, security, property rights, innovation and algorithmic markets. Scott Cleland is author of the book: “Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.” www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com. Cleland also authors the widely-read www.PrecursorBlog.com; publishes www.GoogleMonitor.com; and serves as Chairman of www.NetCompetition.org, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests. Eight Congressional subcommittees have sought Cleland’s expert testimony and Institutional Investor twice ranked him the #1 independent telecom analyst in the U.S. when he was working for institutional investors. See a full bio at www.ScottCleland.com.

The Google+ Antitrust Smoking Gun

In sum, conventional wisdom is missing the forest for the trees here. Many are focused on how this all may affect this company or that company in isolation, while missing the effect on the overall web marketplace. While Twitter has figured out they are the fly to Google’s spider, it’s not clear if Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, IAC, AOL, etc. have figured out yet that they are too. None of them can compete long term with a fully integrated, cross-tied and cross-leveraged Google+ web platform that offers what they do, and much more, all leveraged by Google’s search dominance to disintermediate them from their users, advertisers and data.

To the extent that the FTC, DOJ and the EU antitrust authorities are trying to further grasp the big picture here — Google’s “grand plan” for monopolizing the web more broadly – Google’s executives have explained it quite clearly and their CEO has directed and financially incentivized the Google workforce to make it so. If the FTC, DOJ and the EU don’t do their job and enforce the law, most significant Internet commercial competition on the web is at risk over time.

Finally, a bipartisan Senate antitrust panel has urged the FTC in a letter to conduct a thorough serious investigation of Google for antitrust violations. To date the FTC apparently has not even issued CIDs (subpoenas) to competitors affected. The FTC is already responsible for tipping Google to dominance by approving Google-DoubleClick, and for enabling Google to extend its market dominance into mobile via Google-AdMob. How much more web competition needs to be wiped out on their watch before they act to enforce the law with respect to Google?

Update: “Google is now forcing all new users to create Google+ enabled accounts” per Marketing Land.

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